Can't Stand Losing You
by PineappleGrenade
Summary: Set after the finale of season 3. Alex discovers she has no time for a pint at the Railway Arms - there's still one more job left to do.
1. Chapter 1

Alex Drake sat at the bar in the Railway Arms and tried to remember what it was that she had forgotten.

"Another glass of wine for the lady?" Nelson asked.

Disturbed from her thoughts, she looked up and realised for the first time that at some point that evening her glass had become empty. She felt suddenly relieved. The answer to the empty void she felt inside her had been found.

"Yes, thank you." She watched as Nelson refilled her glass, the ghost of a smile lurking at the corners of her lips. "You know, I had the strangest dream last night." Before she had spoken, she hadn't known what she was going to say and now that it was out, she felt a little foolish. She laughed to cover up her embarrassment. "Only… I can't remember what it was about now. Isn't that silly of me?"

Nelson looked at her like he was about to speak and she got a sense of the most infinite sadness in his eyes; but then, before he could answer, he was hailed by a customer at the other end of the bar. He nodded to her and turned away without saying another word.

'Life on Mars' was playing over the pub's speakers. Alex couldn't think of a time when it hadn't been, but that was okay because she wasn't even sure if any other songs existed.

"Wonder if he'll ever know…" She sung along under her breath before taking a large sip of wine.

The wine was very good. It tasted far more expensive than anything she would have expected to receive in a mere pub, even one as good as the Railway Arms. As she drank more, she began to feel pleasantly relaxed and sleepy. She started to drift back into her thoughts and might have become lost amongst them once again, had it not been for a trick of the light that made it seem as if the door opened.

Every nerve suddenly alert, she turned towards the door. It remained obstinately closed despite her glare. No one ever went out of that door. She had seen people come in, she was sure of it, although they came only rarely. Some of them would sit at the bar night after night, others would come in and nod at her in greeting then she would never see them again. But no one ever left.

Claustrophobia constricted her chest. She had to get out of here. Standing up, she crossed the room swiftly to the door and seized the handle, giving it a brisk push. Nothing happened. Taking a deep breath to keep herself from panicking, she pulled on the handle instead. The door didn't move. With a cry of frustration, she slapped at the smoked glass with her open palm and rattled the door.

A noise behind her made her turn. Nelson was approaching her, a look of concern on his face. "Open this door," she told him, feeling tears beginning to fill her eyes. When he made no move to help her, she shouted "Open it! You can't keep me here! You've got to let me out!" With a strength borne of fear, she turned back to the door and tried once again to escape its confines.

Although she fought with all her strength, she was unable to escape. Finally, exhausted, she sank to her knees and leant her head against the immovable object, tears running down her cheeks.


	2. Chapter 2

Gene was walking back from Luigi's when he stumbled upon the dead body.

It didn't seem right; it being called Luigi's when Luigi wasn't there anymore. Gene supposed that someday soon another person would take over and call it something else. He hoped that it wouldn't be another poncey, flowery name – like Philip's, for example. But for now it was still called Luigi's and he'd had a little too much to drink there in an effort to drown the headache his new DI had given him.

Overcome by a need to release his last few pints back into the wild, he made a detour into the nearest alleyway. The light from the streetlamps didn't quite reach into this mucky little corner of the world and he was forced to stumble along, one hand out against the wall to support himself. He had taken only a couple of steps in before something unseen tripped him up, knocking his feet out from under him.

His upper lip curling slightly in preparation for a snarl, Gene turned to see what it was that had unbalanced him. With some surprise, he found that he was able to pick out the rough shape of a body – a body that happened to be wearing a policeman's helmet and jacket.

"Bugger," Gene stated and fumbled immediately in the pockets of his coat for his radio. "This is your DCI requesting – no, demanding – backup. I've got an officer down in the alley near Luigi's." He snapped the radio off and shoved it back into his pocket before anyone had the chance to answer. Then, for a while, he just knelt there in the damp and filth of the alley, staring at what once had been one of Her Majesty's finest.

He wasn't sure how long he stayed like that, but he knew that he was relieved to finally hear the sound of approaching feet, although he would never admit that to anyone. A small group of CID and a couple of uniformed officers filed into the alleyway, whilst Gene stood and made an attempt to brush off the knees of his trousers, surreptitiously searching for the face of his new DI. He was pleased to see that the long-haired nonce wasn't amongst them.

The narrow alleyway was beginning to get cramped, as policemen jostled each other and shone torches down on the body without managing to illuminate it. In the confusion, the body was knocked several times, altering the position that Gene had found it in. He thought about what the new boy would say about them smearing their greasy fingerprints all over the crime scene before Forensics had had a chance to work their voodoo magic and it was almost enough to make him smile.

Bammo had crouched down beside the body, readying to remove the helmet. As he gingerly pulled it off, Gene had a sudden, crazy premonition that he would see his own face staring back at him with dead, blank eyes; one side of his face caved in and covered with blood. The terrible image lasted only a split-second in his mind, but he was compelled to look out of the mouth of the alley as the corpse's face was revealed.

"It's a dummy," Bammo announced.

Gene felt his anger flare up. "It may not be the smartest thing to do, go wandering into an alley alone at night in the uniform, but I will not have one of our own spoken about like that."

"No Guv, I mean he really _is_ a dummy. Look."

Frowning, Gene turned to look and saw that beneath the helmet there was not a face, but just a slightly dirty cloth sack in the general shape of a head. He shoved through the small crowd of officers to stand beside Bammo, putting the toe of his boot into the Guy-Fawkes. It felt remarkably solid. Perhaps there still was a body after all. He tore the cloth apart and began pulling out the stuffing of old newspapers and roof insulation. There was no face hidden beneath it, but he still emptied the dummy down to the midriff before he was satisfied that there was no corpse hidden inside.

He became aware of the eyes of the other officers on him, watching him closely. With a business-like sniff, he reached across to the shoulder of the jacket that the dummy was wearing. Even in the poor light of the bobbing torches some of the policemen carried, he could tell that the article was the real thing – standard issue. He pulled the number off of the shoulder and handed it up to Bammo.

"Recognise it?"

There was a reflexive silence and then: "No. I'll check it out in the morning."

"Right, well…" Gene pushed himself to his feet and glared around at the assembled officers. He was aware that the dummy had robbed him of a piece of his dignity. The team needed a strong leader, not one who would wet his knickers over a piece of stuffed rag in a policeman's helmet. He would make sure tomorrow that he reminded his team that their Guv was of the former type, not the latter. If he heard one single snigger, he'd bring his wrath down upon them all. "I don't know about you lot, but I'm off home."

Gradually the officers dispersed until Gene was left alone once again. Before going home, he decided he might go back into Luigi's for just one more pint, as he was starting to feel far too sober.

The next morning found Gene sitting in his office and contemplating a rather nasty headache when there was a tap at the door.

"What?" he called out irritably. The door opened and the new skip came in, holding out a manila envelope like a peace offering. "I'm busy," Gene told him as he leant back in his chair, making no effort to appear anything of the kind.

"Bammo said you wanted this information," the new skip said, undeterred. His interest piqued slightly, Gene beckoned for the envelope. Once it was in his hands, he tore it open, scattering the contents over his desk. A photograph of a handsome, smiling young man in uniform fluttered out to land on top of the other papers. Gene checked the number on the shoulder, although he already knew it would be the same as the one he had found on the dummy the night before. The name on the papers was Peter Eddings.

"Did Eddings… Is he alright?"

"He seemed to be when he signed in this morning."

"Hm," Gene grunted, sliding everything back into the envelope, "Then let's keep it that way."

Dismissing the skip in a simple gesture, Gene pushed away from his desk and went out into the main CID room. He stood for a moment, surveying his kingdom, his team, and not particularly liking what he saw. Far from the lean fighting force of law, his team lounged idly about, gossiping and laughing amongst themselves. Something was missing…

He turned to Forrester, who had pushed aside paperwork in favour of a cigarette and now sat with his feet up, blowing smoke rings at the ceiling.

"Where's his Royal Highness?" He asked, referring to the new DI.

Forrester at least had the good grace to jump slightly at the interruption and make an attempt at pulling some papers towards him. "Not in today, Guv," he replied after carefully looking around the room.

For someone with so many airs and graces, the DI didn't show up at work very often. Even on the days that he did come in, he operated like a lone agent, thinking himself too high and mighty to participate in the daily routine of work in a police station. Disciplinary action would have to be taken. Gene vowed to do so the next time the bastard condescended to put in an appearance.

He crossed the room – pushing one man's feet off the desk as he went – to the whiteboard and rubbed off the cuss-words and dirty doodles that had accumulated there. Taking up a pen he wrote the name Peter Eddings in capital letters, and then rapped the board loudly to command attention. "Right, you bunch of sagging girls' tits, one of our own has been threatened and I want something done about it."

There was a general chorus of 'Yes Guv's.

Someone has gotten close enough to him to nick his helmet and jacket. Whoever it is, we can assume from the little trick with the Guy Fawkes dummy that they are trying to tell us that they can get to our man any time they want to, none of us being able to do a thing to stop them. It's our job to find out who this sick bastard is and show him what we do with his kind of underhanded scum."

"Could have been an inside job, Guv," said a voice from the doorway.

Gene scowled, annoyed to find that he had been interrupted by some skinny bird wearing jeans so tight she was showing her Fanny Craddock. "Who the bloody 'ell are you?" he snapped.


	3. Chapter 3

The smile faded from Alex's face. Since coming to, unsure of where she was or what had happened to her, she had been compelled to go to Fenchurch East police station. Some part of her had instinctively understood that it was where she belonged. But now, the one man she had been counting on for answers and protection didn't even recognise her. Her heart sank.

"My name is Alex Drake," she faltered.

"And what, Alex Drake, are you doing coming in here and disrupting my team?"

Blinking back tears, Alex searched the pockets of her jacket until she found her police identification. "I work here," she said, only just managing to keep the break out of her voice, although she was unable to stop her hand from shaking.

She flinched slightly as Gene came to her and snatched her licence. Silently he studied her photo, transferred his gaze to her, and then handed back the wallet. His face was hard. "You're in the wrong department."

"What? I can't be…"

"Says here you're assigned to traffic control, love. This is CID."

"Oh, of course. I must have gotten lost. I'm new here, you see." She attempted a silly girlish giggle that made her feel a little sick to her stomach.

As she turned away to leave she heard someone – obviously not the fastest bullet in the chamber – quip "Woman and directions." Someone else commented "I'd like to come across her in Lost and Found," and received much more appreciative laughter for his efforts.

The door swung shut behind her, but not before she heard the laughter cut short by a sharp bellow of "Back to work! This isn't a bloody alternative comedy club."

After a long day of going through the motions, smiling in the right places and ignoring the seemingly endless requests for a cuppa from her new male colleagues, Alex found herself standing outside Luigi's. She experienced a rush of homecoming that almost overwhelmed her. Gratefully she pushed in through the doors, luxuriating in the warm, friendly atmosphere. She almost expected to hear Luigi calling a greeting to her, but of course he didn't.

Almost immediately, she spotted Gene sitting alone at the bar and went over to him out of habit before she could stop herself. "It's ironic," she said as she sat down beside him and ordered a drink, "I spent so long trying to get home, but now that I'm here I feel like I finally am home."

Gene regarded her silent for a moment and then looked back at his glass. She caught the scent of stale whisky beneath his aftershave. "AA meetings are on a Thursday."

After that rebuff, they both fell quiet for a while, concentrating on their own private thoughts. Alex's hand trembled around the stem of her wine glass, even though she tried her best to steady it. She couldn't get the image of Gene's blank lack of recognition out of her head. It was like a physical blow every time he looked at her that way. She realised that she was helpless in this world without him.

"Gene…" She blurted out, surprised by the level of desperation she heard in her voice.

"If you don't mind, _I _prefer to do my drinking alone."

She thought back to the times she was starting to remember – her and Gene and the others sat around a table, talking and laughing together over after-work drinks. "Yeah. Yeah, okay," she said quietly, taking her drink and leaving him.

Sitting alone, she observed in the shape of Gene's shoulders and the downcast angle of his head, the look of a man who was drinking to forget. All she wanted to do was remember. Remember the life she had built for herself here, make Gene remember her and maybe, just maybe, remember what it was that had drawn her back.

She was roused from her thought by the appearance of Bammo at Gene's elbow, bent to whisper urgently in the DCI's ear. Whatever it was he had said, it galvanised Gene into action. He knocked back the last of his drink, stood, and then swept out of the bar after Bammo in a flurry of purpose. Alex briskly followed, wishing that her high heels weren't so loud against the pavement.

Fortunately, the destination wasn't so far away that Gene needed to drive, which allowed Alex to stay easily on his tail. Soon they were drawing to a stop outside a terraced house on a pleasant street. Squad cars were already parked outside, although those that had driven them there stood in small groups talking quietly amongst themselves. There was an air of stillness about the place that made the hair on the back of Alex's neck prickle.

Gene had disappeared through the open front door. After a moment's hesitation, Alex followed. She found herself walking down a hallway into a living room where she was met with a tragic scene. A handful of men stood in the corner, smoking cigarettes, but she hardly noticed them. Her attention was immediately drawn to the body lying on the blood-soaked carpet and Gene standing over it, his face thunderous.

She thought she might have recognised the corpse on the floor, but wasn't sure from where. Then she noticed the shirt he wore and knew even through the blood that stained it, that it was part of the standard police uniform. She must have seen him around the station. One of their own gunned down in his own living room. She noticed now other details, like his jacket hanging over the back of a chair, the photographs of him and smiling woman holding a child scattered about the room.

"Eddings…" Gene lifted his head and looked around as if expecting to find the murderer still lurking in some forgotten corner of the room. He pulled a hip flask from an inside pocket of his coat and took a long pull. "Put his wife and son under police protection and tell them that Gene Hunt has vowed to catch the murdering bastard scum that did this."

Bammo left immediately on his errand, but Gene remained a while. It seemed almost as if he were waiting for something. Then, some small detail must have caught his eye, for he went over to the coffee table. His head moved surreptitiously, checking to make sure that he was unobserved, then he picked up a slim book from the table and slid it inside his coat. Removing evidence from a crime scene. Alex saw it all.

Her breath caught in her throat as he turned around to face her and started walking towards her. She had never known him to intentionally harm her before, but she knew also that things were different now. The rules had changed. Gene, however, was looking straight through her as if she wasn't even there. She wasn't sure if this relieved or frightened her. Without a word, Gene brushed past her and then was gone.

Stepping out onto the pavement a few moments later, Alex thought she could detect faint strains of music coming from somewhere. She recognised it as the National Anthem. Looking around, she was unable to work out where it was coming from. The street appeared to be completely deserted. Even as she searched, the music grew louder and more boisterous. Soon it had reached such a crescendo that she could feel the beat pounding inside her head, making it ache. Then, abruptly, it was joined by laughter – harsh and mocking – and just when she thought she could endure it no longer, the music and the laughter stopped.

She was left with a chill that had nothing to do with the cold night air. Wrapping her jacket more tightly around her, she hurried away.


	4. Chapter 4

Alex was checking car registration numbers against a handwritten database and wishing that someone would hurry up and invent Excel, when she met him.

Gradually she became aware of a presence in the room other than herself and looked up to find a man standing in front of her desk. He had longish blonde hair and was wearing a roll-neck jumper that she found quite ridiculous. He smiled nastily at her.

"Can I help you?" she asked, brisk and professional.

The man laughed and sat on the corner of her desk, which irked Alex no end, even if he did have a rather nice bottom.

"Can you help me?" he mused, rubbing his chin. "That's an interesting question."

"You should go to reception if you have any enquiries, sir."

"What year is it, Alex?"

The use of her name from someone she had never met before shocked Alex into answering. "1981," she said, slightly disturbed to find that she had to check the date on the papers in her hands for confirmation before replying and even then, the date didn't sound quite right in her mouth. It was if she felt it should have been a later one, but that was an implausible notion.

He laughed again, as if she had just told a joke. "You don't belong here."

"No," she agreed quietly, looking at the tedious list of meaningless figures in front of her. "I have a degree in Psychology." She was startled by the man suddenly snatching the paper from her hand and beginning to tear it up into little pieces. For the first time, fear of her uidentified visitor began to creep around the edges of her mind, numbing her.

"You can't do that!" She cried angrily, getting to her feet.

"Oh Alex, Alex… I can do whatever I want. Don't you see? I'm dead." Something in his bearing changed then, became more aggressive, desperate. Allowing the torn pieces of paper to flutter to the floor around his feet, he reached forwards and grabbed Alex by the lapels of her jacket, pulling her closer. "I could kill you right here and nobody would do a thing."

He looked into her eyes, searching them. Something he saw there must have amused him, for he threw back his head and let loose a shrill, high-pitched giggle that sprayed Alex with spittle. She shivered.

"But what would be the point of that, eh Alex? Because you're already dead, aren't you?" He pushed her roughly back into her chair and regarded her levelly. "You shouldn't have come back here." With that, he turned and left.

Alex was up and after him in an instant, but when she reached the corridor there was no sign of him. She searched the surrounding rooms for a while, but was eventually forced to admit defeat and return to her desk. The only sign that the man had ever existed was the shredded paper littering the floor.

* * *

"What have you done with him?" Gene demanded, slamming both hands down on the desk.

Startled from her work for the second time that day, Alex glared up at the Guv. "What have I done with whom?"

"My DI, woman!" Gene was hardly able to repress his snarl.

Alex thought back, trying to work out what on Earth the man might be on about. She remembered the raving man with blonde hair. "_That_ was your DI?"

"Don't play innocent with me! You show up on my patch and officers start dying, then my DI vanishes off the face of the bloody planet and the last person he's seen talking to is you."

"Your DI was here threatening to kill me."

At this, Gene looked just about ready to pull a gun on her himself. With an effort, he was able to control himself enough to say "It's game over for you, Drake. I couldn't find your transfer files, all your paperwork has been lost – it's like you don't exist."

The aspersions being cast on her reality were beginning to rile Alex. "Are you threatening me now, as well?"

"No. This is threatening you – give me one reason why I shouldn't have you arrested for murder."

Alex took a deep breath. "I didn't want to reveal this so early on, but I'm here from Special Branch. We've suspected that a killer might have insinuated himself into this station for a while and I've been sent to confirm that suspicion."

If anything, this news seemed to anger Gene just as much as if she had just admitted to the murder. "Bastards! You go back and tell Special bastard Branch that they can shove their suspicions up their-"

"Guv!"

Interrupted just as he was about to embark upon an explicit gesture to accompany his words, Gene turned angrily towards the door. The skip stood there, a piece of paper held in his hand like a white flag of surrender.

"What?"

"It's your DI; he was seen entering his flat about ten minutes ago."

"I'm coming with you!" Alex called, hurrying to get up and around her desk as the Guv strode towards the door. He glanced back at her and for a moment it seemed as if he would refuse, but then he nodded grimly.

"Skip, fire up the – oh bugger."

* * *

"An Austin Allegro?" Alex was unable to keep the amusement out of her voice. It was difficult to reconcile the great Gene Hunt with a car of such embarrassing reputation.

"Shut up, get in and don't touch anything," Gene rumbled. He slammed the driver's door shut so violently behind him that the poor car trembled on its suspension. Alex was hardly settled in the passenger's seat before Gene accelerated, bullying the car into speeds it almost certainly wasn't built to go.

Thanks to some reckless driving, it was only a matter of minutes before the car was screaming to a halt outside a block of flats. Although to Alex, sitting white-knuckled in the front seat, even that short ride had felt too long for comfort. Shakily, she extricated herself from the vehicle, thankful to be back on solid pavement in one piece.

A couple of teenage boys were hanging out of one of the upper storey windows, whistling and catcalling. "Pigs!" one of them called whilst the other leant forwards and sent a gobbet of saliva hurtling down towards the gravel.

Alex glanced over the top of the Allegro to see Gene thrusting two fingers up at the hecklers. "Get back inside or I'll come up there and garrotte you with your own Walkman headphones," the DCI bellowed. The two youths ducked back inside, still jeering, and the window slid shut.

"That was unnecessary," Alex said, as Gene strode forwards and kicked in the entrance doors.

They were standing at the foot of the first flight of stairs when the music started.

"_Keep smiling through, just like you always do…"_

"Do you hear that too?" Gene's voice was an urgent whisper and his hand had dropped to his gun. Alex nodded. Together, they quietly ascended the stairs. The music grew louder with every step they took.

"…_And I know we'll meet again some sunny day…"_

On the third landing, Gene nodded towards one of the doors. They approached it warily, each taking up a position either side of the door. Gene drew his gun, flexing his fingers around it as he readied it in his hands.

"_Daydaydaydayday"_

The music, which had sounded like it was being played on an old and scratchy record to begin with, had become stuck. It skipped mindlessly on the single word until it lost all meaning and coherence. With each maddening repetition, Alex felt the unease in the pit of her stomach increase.

"Police!" Gene shouted over the noise. Then, he counted off three fingers before shouldering his way through the door into the flat. Alex followed a split second later. The muzzles of their guns swept the room only to find it deserted. A record player sat on a table near the window. Gene kicked it to the floor and a blissful silence filled the flat.

By silent consent, they split up and searched the rest of the rooms. In the bedroom, Alex opened the door of a built-in wardrobe. Something swung at her out of the darkness, making her scream.

Gene was there just in time to catch Alex as she collapsed into his arms. Instinctively, she clung to him, trembling, her face pressed against his chest. It took no longer than a second for him to work out what it was that had shocked her so – hanging by the neck in the wardrobe was a body. With the sun filtering in through the thin curtains it was possible to tell that it was another dummy, but Gene knew only too well how real the dummies could look when discovered unexpectedly. Especially considering that this one had a photograph of Bammo stuck on its face.

He hesitated for a moment, and then patted Alex's hair in what he hoped was a reassuring manner. "Come on Lady Bollinger-knickers," he chided gently, "it's not a real body. Look, it's just one of them dummies people chuck on the bonfire." He was rewarded by Alex laughing snottily against his chest.

After a moment that lingered on slightly too long for the comfort of both of them, Alex drew away and wiped her eyes. Carefully, she avoided looking at the body dangling behind her back. "Like the one you found before."

"Yes." Alex noticed for the first time that Gene also seemed to have been badly shaken up by something. "Now that you're all bright-eyed and rosy-cheeked," he continued, "there's something I think you should see."

* * *

"My God…" Alex breathed.

They were standing in another room of the flat. It might once have been intended as a dining room, but the current occupant had turned it into a scene out of a matinee thriller. Every square inch of the walls was covered by pictures and maps with routes marked out in red felt tip. The pictures were photographs of everyone who worked in Fenchurch East police station. Some of the pictures had obviously been taken whilst the subjects were unaware, as they showed the officers at home, taking their leisure. Alex put her hand over her mouth in shock.

Half of one wall appeared to be dedicated almost solely to Gene. The pictures of him, however, differed from the rest in that someone had taken a sharp object to them and scratched out the face, leaving him unrecognisable except for the hair.

"Why would someone do this?"

"You're the one with all the special inside information, Miss bloody Marple, you tell me."

Alex struggled for a moment to understand what the DCI meant, then remembered she had told him she was undercover from Special Branch. "This definitely confirms our suspicions. What's more, the meticulous attention to detail of the person who created… this, suggests an obsessive mind, as well as intelligent and compulsive.

"The defacing of your pictures alone leads me to believe that he carries some kind of personal vendetta against you, expressed in his feelings as impotent rage. He feels powerless against you, which makes him all the more dangerous, as he will be lashing blindly out in a wild attempt to hurt you."

There was a pause and then "I need a drink."

Alex lingered on a while after Gene had left, admiring the tireless attention to detail displayed on the walls, despite their sinister intentions. That mind, when turned to police work, must have been magnificent. But it wasn't just a begrudging admiration that kept her in the small room. Although she had met him for only a few moments and everything she knew about him pointed to the fact that he was certifiable, she felt a strange kinship to the DI. For reasons that she was unable to explain, she felt that there was an understanding between them and she could sympathise with whatever had sent him down the path of madness.

Frightened and confused by her own thoughts, Alex found herself reaching out to run her fingertips across the mutilated photographs of Gene. In doing so, she disturbed a pile of papers waiting to be put up on the already overcrowded walls. A dark cardboard folder caught her eye and she bent down to retrieve it. It was filled with articles torn from newspapers, some yellow with age whilst others looked newer. The topmost article showed a younger Gene shaking hands with another man whom Alex thought she recognised, but couldn't quite remember why. The headline told of Gene's promotion to DCI. The date had been ringed several times in pen, so violently that it had almost torn the paper in one place.

Curious, Alex hid the folder inside her jacket. Remembering how she had witnessed Gene removing evidence in the same manner just yesterday and had condemned him for it, she blushed guiltily. But she was convinced that she would find the answers she needed about why she had come back, in the folder.

Going out into the main living area once again, she found that Gene had raided the drinks cabinet and taken a bottle of their absent host's best malt liquor into custody. Unashamedly, he locked eyes with Alex and then took a long drink.

"Are you alright?" she asked quietly.

"Am I alright?" Gene's upper lip lifted in a silent snarl. "Of course I'm not all-bloody-right. My DI is missing, then you come here and tell me that I've made him impotent. No one wants to hear that they've done that to another man; especially not one that they work with, that they're responsible for."

Despite the slightly confused, macho bluster that DCI had expressed his concerns in, Alex felt that she understood perfectly what it was that had sent him into an even blacker mood. "Guv…"

He scowled and lifted the bottle to his lips again. Determined to make him listen to her, Alex went to him and took his head between her hands. The bottle halted in its ascent and he glared up at her with irritation.

"There's nothing you or anyone could have done to save him. His mind was already made up."

He was silent for a while, carefully studying her face. For a moment she dared to hope that she had gotten through to him, but then he twisted his head free of her hands and drank deeply from the bottle. When he turned back to her, he put one hand on her waist and drew her closer, his head tilting up towards hers.

It took a few confused seconds for Alex to realise that the Guv was intending to kiss her. Surprised, she jumped back with a cry of "What do you think you're doing?"

"Come off it, Bolly, you've been giving me the misty-eyed look ever since you first came blundering into my department. You're desperate for a piece of the Gene Genie."

Alex didn't know whether to laugh or slap him. In the end she settled for telling him "I think you've had too much to drink," before turning and leaving.


	5. Chapter 5

"No one's going to touch a hair on your head, not on my watch." Gene clapped a reassuring hand on Bammo's shoulder.

Twenty-four hours had passed since Gene had discovered the dummy with Bammo's face stuck on it hanging in his missing DI's apartment and, judging by how quickly the same threat had been carried out on Eddings, Gene had told his man to stay the night at the station. Bammo had readily agreed.

Looking around Gene felt, as he so often seemed to these days, that there was something missing. The feeling had nothing to do with the dark, deserted look of CID, containing as it did only he and Bammo with a couple of men posted at the door. Working late as frequently as he did, Gene was used to the forlorn aspect the station took on at night and it didn't bother him. No, it was something else that was unsettling him. He drew his gun from its holster and checked that it was loaded – nothing amiss in that department.

Then it hit him. With a nod to Bammo, he disappeared into his office only to reappear a moment later with two glasses and a bottle of whisky. He set the glasses down on a desk and tipped some liquor into them.

"To scum," he toasted Bammo, lifting his glass in a mock salute, "may their scrots ever remain squeezed tight in the palms of ours hands." With a sadistic grimace, he downed the contents of his glass in one go. The whisky burned his throat and warmed his belly, chasing away the last lingering traces of unease.

The evening passed slowly. Gene was inexplicably losing at the second game of cards in a row when one of the overhead lights flickered. Scowling, he looked up. It flickered again. The adjoining light mimicked its companion.

"What's happening?"

"Must be a fault with the electrics." Gene stood up. "I'll get one of the boys to check it out."

He had gotten no more than halfway across the room when all the lights began to flicker in unison; then, suddenly, they went out, plunging the station into darkness.

* * *

Alex sat cross-legged on the living room floor of her apartment, glass of wine in one hand and the folder she had taken from the DI's flat on the carpet in front of her. Music played softly in the background.

Her head throbbed with the monotony of her working day and for a while she simply sat, cradling her forehead in her free hand. After a while she felt able to embark upon the task she had set herself. A quick sip of wine to further fortify herself, then she upended the folder's contents onto the floor.

She turned first to the article about Gene's promotion and studied the face of the other man in the picture. The caption beneath it named him as Superintendent Macintosh. "Super Mac," she said aloud and that sounded right. It made her think of handshakes and locked doors. Yes, she had known this man once. The article was dated 1967.

The next newspaper clipping she found froze the blood in her veins. It was an obituary for Superintendent Macintosh – the photograph of him showed a man not looking a day older than the one in which he stood with Gene. He had been, the article read, the third victim in a spate of cop murders, all believed to be the work of one man whose identity was as of then unknown. Macintosh had died in 1960.

There had to be some kind of mistake – a misprint perhaps, or two brothers who had both gone into police work, but in her heart she knew that the man in the articles was one and the same. Macintosh had been dead for seven years when he promoted Gene Hunt.

Frantically she went through the rest of the papers, hoping to find clarity, but all she managed to uncover was more confusion. Determined to find out the answers for herself, she quickly stood up and left the apartment.

* * *

Having left the two officers protecting Bammo, Gene stalked through the darkened corridors of the station in search of a fuse box. He could vaguely remember having once seen one in the room where all the records and paperwork ended up, so it was towards there that he directed his steps. His only illumination came from a torch that was fast running out of batteries.

The torch was just beginning to protest in earnest when he came upon his destination. The door, usually kept locked, was ajar. For the first time, Gene felt suddenly thankful for the poor organisation that had kept the torch from receiving new batteries as its weak light would be harder for an intruder to spot. He drew his gun and slipped in through the door.

It soon turned out that he needn't have worried about the light from his torch, for there the intruder stood in a bright spotlight of their own.

"You!" Gene barked out.

Startled, the figure wheeled around and was blinded by the light of their own torch, which they had left on top of a filing cabinet to brighten the room. They lifted a hand to shield their eyes. The room was in a terrible mess, filing cabinet drawers forced open and papers littering the floor like a second carpet.

"Guv, thank goodness you're here," the intruder, who just happened to be the ubiquitous Alex, gasped. She thrust a fistful of papers into Gene's face. "They're blank, every single one of them! All the papers filed in here are blank!"

Gene, his temper flaring as memories of his drunken solicitations of the night before came creeping back unbidden, knocked Alex's hand aside. "You're out of your pretty little mind, love. What are you doing here?"

She launched then into a long and garbled account of dates and newspapers and dead people who were alive. Gene listened with growing detachment, each stumbling contradictory explanation only convincing him further that he had Eddings' murderer standing right in front of him. The woman was obviously a mental case.

"I've heard enough." He switched the torch off and threw it aside, preparing to arrest Alex.

"Shh!" Before he could stop her, Alex had cleared the space between them and clamped one hand over his mouth. She looked up into his eyes, her own wide with terror. "Did you hear that?"

He dragged her hand away and was just about to reply that he couldn't hear a bloody thing except for the sound of her incessant yapping, when he did hear something. A slight rustling noise, as of someone trying to move stealthily across a paper-strewn floor, almost quiet enough to be dismissed; but then he heard a definite cough. He tensed.

"Friend of yours, Bolls?"

Dumbly, Alex shook her head.

The rustling sound edged closer. "Right then," Gene decided, motioning with his gun for Alex to get behind him out of the way. More loudly, he said "Gene Hunt has not played hide and seek since his fifth birthday party and has no intention of starting again now. So come out, come out, wherever you are." He set his jaw, narrowed his eyes and readied his gun.

It was at that moment that the torch rolled from its perch on top of the filing cabinet and shattered against the floor, returning them to darkness.

In the following confusion of sounds and movement, Alex thought she heard throaty, barking laughter - alien and strange. It sent a shiver worming down her back. The laughter was closely followed by a noise that seemed to be one of the heavy filing cabinets being knocked over. She flinched away as her head boomed with the residual echoes, feeling a rush of air pass by her.

Suddenly, a hoarse shout cut through the air. "Bolly! Bolly, I've been shot."


	6. Chapter 6

As if conscious that they were needed, the lights slowly flickered back to life. Alex spared the briefest of moments to ensure that the intruder had left, before hurrying to Gene's aid. He was crouched on the floor, one arm cradling his stomach. As she approached he looked up and in his eyes she saw not the hard lawman she was used to, but a frightened boy.

"Tell them… tell them that my body's here," he murmured as if talking from the depths of a dream. "I don't want to be forgotten."

Alex blinked back tears, kneeling down in front of him. "No one's going to forget you," she promised. "Here, let me look…" Gently, she prised Gene's arm away from his stomach.

They both found themselves looking down at a clean, if slightly rumpled, shirt front. There was no sign of blood, or even a bullet hole. Puzzled, Alex went to undo the buttons of Gene's shirt. His hands came forwards to meet hers, pushing them away.

"Christ woman, do you anything think of anything else besides hanky panky?"

Meeting his gaze, she saw that the gun-slinging sheriff had returned; but there was something else in his eyes, something that gave Alex hope – she saw recognition. Startled into silence, she simply watched as Gene rose to his feet and brusquely slapped dust from his trouser legs. He scowled impatiently down at her.

"Come on then DI Drake, we've got a murdering scumbag to catch."

Bemused, she stood up and followed him out of the room. The door slamming shut behind her made her wince. "DI?" She queried, hurrying to catch up with the Guv's purposeful stride.

"Yes DI. You'd forget your own knickers if they weren't stapled to your arse."

"But I'm not…"

He wheeled abruptly around to face her, his expression hard with seriousness. "Look Bolly, I don't know what you thought you were doing, transferring yourself over to traffic control like you did, but I've got a DI missing and as far as I can recall, you weren't too bad at the job." He started walking again, Alex following more slowly, lost in thought.

"DI Drake," she whispered to herself. Yes, that was right – she had been Gene's detective inspector. He was right too; she hadn't been bad at it at all. Why on earth had she ever changed departments? But then, she'd done a lot of inexplicable things during her break down.

She was brought out of her thoughts by Gene stopping dead just outside the doors to CID, one warning held back to keep her from coming any further. His predatory watchfulness infected her, made her feel nervous and in control at the same time. Taking one door each, they swept into CID, alert for danger. They were too late.

In silent, savage fury, Gene kicked over a desk. Alex jumped. She knew it was the sight of the two unconscious officers lying bound and gagged on the floor that had angered him, knew that he was blaming himself for their condition. She also knew that the sight of the two beaten and bound policemen meant that there was a corpse in the room.

Taking a deep breath, she slowly raised her eyes. There was Bammo, slumped awkwardly at the desk in front of the whiteboard, a bullet hole in his chest. His head was tilted back, arms dangling limply at his sides as if the force of the shot had thrown him back in his chair. Two empty glasses and a bottle of whisky untouched on the desk in front of him.

The man who had accosted her and Gene in the records room, he must either have come straight here whilst she had been preoccupied with the Guv's phantom bullet wound, or he had already paid the visit to Bammo before coming to them. One thing was certain – they had had the killer in their grasp and let him get away.

On the whiteboard behind what was left of Bammo, a message had been scrawled in block capitals. "Don't think I've forgotten about you, Hunt. You're next," she read aloud, her voice a horrified hush.

She was startled by Gene pushing past her, approaching the corpse. For one horrible second, she thought he was going to grab Bammo's body by the lapels, try to shake him back into life, but he only snatched up the whisky bottle. He raised it to his lips then hesitated, the bottle poised but unmoving, then, with an inarticulate snort of frustration, he threw it against the wall. The bottle smashed loudly, raining alcohol and glass shards onto the floor.

It was silent after that, Gene's harsh breathing the only sound in the room.

"I'm going after the bastard that did this," Gene announced suddenly into the unnatural quiet that had descended. "He can't have gotten far."

"No, wait." Alex paused, swallowing the panic she could feel trying to crawl up her throat from inside her chest. "You should call in some back up first."

"No."

"This isn't a game!" She flared up, the stress she was labouring under taking its toll on her ability for self-control. "It's not a chance for you to go out and play the hero and stroke your ego. A man, a police officer, has lost his life here and if you go running off on your own now, there's every chance you could be killed too, all because you wanted to be the man. How is that honouring him? At least if you go with back up there's more chance you could catch the murderer."

Glowering, the Guv simply glared at her for a few seconds. His expression was unreadable. Finally he needed. "I'll go call for back up. You take pictures of… of the body and the writing."

"I'll get Chris to do it," Alex murmured, only half concentrating.

"What?"

She blinked, unnerved by the sharpness she heard in Gene's voice. "I said I'd do it."

"No you didn't, you said you'd get Chris to do it. Who's Chris?"

"I don't know. I don't even know why I said it."

It was preying on the Guv's mind, she could see that in his face, but going after the killer was a more urgent matter. He left the room with nothing further than a curt nod.

* * *

Alex was woken early the next morning by the sounds of CID coming to life around her. She had spent the whole night overseeing the removal of Bammo's corpse by the crime scene investigation boys, and then searching through records in an attempt to find the author of the threat.

The desk she sat at was piled high with thick folders, the stacks hemming her in like a child's homemade fort. Each folder was filled with information on everyone who had ever been incarcerated at Fenchurch, the records occasionally containing a sample of the criminal's handwriting against which she was checking the scrawl on the board. It was a mind-numbing, impossible task. She had given in to exhaustion somewhere around five that morning.

Gene passed her desk. "Tea, seven sugars – no, make that nine."

"I'm not…" She started to say, and then gave up. With a heartfelt sigh she delicately extricated herself from the precarious towers of files and crossed the room to the kitchen area. Gene followed her.

"Any luck?" she asked as she switched the kettle on, already knowing the answer.

"No. You?"

"Not a bit." The kettle boiled, she poured out the water and added three carefully levelled spoonfuls of sugar to the brewing tea. "We'll catch him though, we have to. It's our job."

"Are you married, Drake?"

"No – Although, once I…" She faltered, suddenly and acutely unsure of herself. Her cheeks burned and she found herself praying that she wasn't blushing.

"You never will be either, not until you learn that when a man asks for nine sugars in his tea, you give him nine bloody sugars." Gene edged her aside so that he could take charge of the spoon.

Embarrassed and annoyed – with herself as much as with the Guv – Alex stormed back to the desk she had taken over as her own. With the steady rhythm of police work ebbing and flowing around her, she should have found her work easier, but perversely it only served to distract her. She found herself drifting off, unable to concentrate.

It was this desk, she decided after several minutes of inactivity. How could anyone be expected to concentrate when their surroundings were so untidy? After all, a clear working space equalled a clear mind. Yes, she would tidy up a little and then she would be much more efficient, able to help catch the brutal killer.

Distractedly, she opened one of the desk drawers, intending to clear some space. The first thing that caught her eye was some paper covered in a dense, closely packed hand. She stared at it for a long time, hearing her heartbeat in her ears. Then she looked at the photograph of the threat that had been written on the whiteboard. Back down at the handwriting on the paper. Although one was larger and hurried, driven by emotion, there was no mistaking that both had been written by the same person. Her eyes came to rest on the name at the bottom of the paper and with a jolt of shock and excitement, she realised she was looking at the name of the murderer.


	7. Chapter 7

"Guv! Guv, I know who did it! I know who our perp is!" Rushing into Gene's office with the incriminating piece of paper clutched in her fist, Alex pulled up short as she realised that the office was empty. Perplexed, she looked in vain around the small room as suspecting that the Guv might be hiding in one of the corners or under the desk. Surely if he had left, she would have seen him?

The mug of tea on his desk was still warm, almost untouched.

Leaving at a slower pace than she had entered, Alex leant against the doorframe of Gene's office and tried to think what course of action she should take next. She caught sight of Forrester sitting nearby, telephone receiver in one hand and a cigarette in the other. He looked up as she approached and she felt a stab of guilt as she saw that his eyes were red-rimmed with unshed tears. Whilst she had been playing detective, chasing after the phantoms of dead men found in newspaper clippings, this man had lost friends and colleagues. Ashamed of herself, she silently vowed not to lose focus like that again.

"Where's the Guv?" she asked in a hushed voice, not wanting to disturb his phone call.

He held the receiver against his chest, kicked back and took a long drag on his cigarette before replying. "He went out about a minute ago."

"Do you know where?"

Forrester shook his head, returning the receiver to his ear.

Thwarted in her moment of triumph, Alex left the precinct wit the vague notion of somehow catching up with Gene. Outside, his Allegro was still parked just by the doors and a scrutiny of the street yielded no clues as to where he might have gone. If he hadn't taken the car though, he couldn't have planned on travelling very far. Restlessly, Alex resolved to wait for the Guv's return in his office.

Time seemed to drag in that office, stretching out like chewing gum; but when Alex glanced at the clock she found that only a couple of minutes had passed. She was anxious for Gene to return so that she could tell him of her deductions, go after the murderer with him. How had he managed to slip past her unnoticed when she had spoken to him only moments before?

She tapped out a rhythm on the desk with her fingernails, blew out her cheeks and swivelled on the chair, but still the second hand on the clock moved no faster than a crawl. So she shuffled the papers on Gene's desk. One piece of paper, buried beneath a multitude of others, coyly peeked out a corner and caught Alex's eye. Doodled in ballpoint pen was a crude cartoon of Gene in a Wild West sheriff's outfit, complete with hat and wide rawhide jeans. Smiling fondly at the childlike ego of the man, she pulled it out of the pile for closer inspection.

As she did so, the police radio perched on one corner of the desk crackled and she tensed, preparing to answer it. There was no reason why she should assume it to be Gene trying to get in contact, especially considering that it would mean he was calling his own radio, but still she felt a sense of crushing disappointment as the radio died back down to silence without a word from the Guv. She settled back down with her prize.

But something had changed. The little cartoon, so innocent before, now revealed itself to be something more sinister. Half of the face of the cartoon Gene was missing, instead there was only an open wound encrusted with blood and dirt. Alex felt the fine hairs on the back of her neck stand on end.

More cartoons also covered paper – faces she felt that she recognised although she could not think why. Delicately, her shaking fingers traced the outlines of the face of a pretty young woman with jaw-length dark hair, a man sporting a moustache and curly hair, and another man who beneath a fashionable haircut wore an expression of pained, endearing earnestness. Both the men wore cowboy hats, the woman a large fascinator of feathers, so they fit in with the Western theme of the doodles, but to Alex they seemed jarringly out of place. It was as if they had no right to exist, even as drawings.

She gulped in air, realising belatedly that her cheeks were wet with tears she hadn't known she'd cried. How had Gene done it? How had he reached into the depths of her subconscious and dredged up these faces? Did they haunt him too? From an early age she had carried these unknown faces with her, had at times even conversed with them, until various psychologists had cured her of the habit and helped her to forget the faces almost completely.

Not wanting to look at the drawings one moment more, she stuffed the piece of paper haphazardly back amongst the pile. Then, trying to distract her mind from unpleasant thoughts, she opened and closed the desk drawers, taking things out at random without really looking at them. The radio crackled again but she barely noticed. Coming across a hardback book she paused, something about the slim tome attracting her attention. Of course – this was the book she had watched Gene remove at the scene of Eddings' murder.

There was nothing to identify it on the cover, so she opened it up. The title page proclaimed the book as being a collection of poems by John Keats. Unable to think of a reason why Gene should want such a thing, or what reason there would be for him to steal and then hide it, she flipped through the pages. There was no secret information, or coded defacing of the pages, just neat lines of poetry. The book didn't even look as if it had been read very much.

"_I'm forever blowing bubbles…_"

Alex jumped and bit back a yelp of surprise as the disembodied voice suddenly crooned out a song. For one disconcerting moment, she thought that the singing had come from the police radio, but then she looked up to find a man standing in the doorway of the office. Forrester was hovering beside him.

"Keats to see you, ma'm," he said before swiftly disappearing.

Alex hid the turmoil in her mind behind a playful smile. "I was just reading about you."

He gave her a look of friendly, open bemusement. "Pardon?" His expression then changed to one of understanding as Alex showed him the book in her hand. "Ah, no, wrong Keats I'm afraid. I can't string a sentence together, let alone poetry." Laughing slightly, he held out one hand towards her. "I'm Jim. Jim Keats."

"DI Alex Drake." She accepted the proffered handshake. As Jim's eyes met hers, she felt a strange electric shiver run through her. Trying to let nothing show on her face, she took her hand back and hid it under the table so that he could wipe the feel of him off onto her trousers.

"What can I do to help you?"

Jim's face became serious. He removed his glasses and folded them into the breast pocket of his jacket, as if to symbolise that there was nothing to hide between the two of them. "You can tell me where your DI is."

"But I don't know."

The tone of his voice dropped then, became soft and caressing. "It's okay Alex; you don't have to protect him anymore."

"Protect him from what?"

"You don't know?" He searched her face, seemed taken aback and relieved at the same time by something he saw there. "You don't know, do you. Alex, Gene Hunt is wanted for the murders of Gerard Eddings and Patrick 'Bammo' Bambridge."

Alex's heart leapt into her mouth with shock, making her feel nauseous. "No! No, he didn't kill them, he couldn't have, because I know…" Abruptly, she stopped herself before she could announce that she knew who the murderer was. She lowered her eyes to the evidence in her lap, the name written on that piece of paper, and protectively clenched her fists around it.

"What? What do you know?"

"I know he can't be the murderer because I was with him… I saw him on the… on the night that Bammo was murdered." She faltered, unsure of what she was saying now for an entirely different reason. Keats remained silent, allowing her to think it slowly through in her head. Yes, she had been in the station with Gene on that night, but the Guv had been there before her. Then there had been that strange business of him acting as though he had been shot when he hadn't been – could that have been meant to distract her whilst an accomplice got away? And the note on the whiteboard, that could have been engineered to steer suspicion away from him. She looked again at the signature in her hands.

"Oh Gene…" She had spoken barely above a whisper, his name just a quiet exhalation of despair. Louder, she raised her head and asked Keats if she could see any identification. He said he was from Internal Affairs and readily handed over the supporting paperwork. It all checked out.


	8. Chapter 8

**A/N: **Sorry this chapter has taken so long, I've been really busy lately. Thank you to everyone who's been reading and reviewing this!

* * *

It was so dark that there was no discernible difference between having his eyes open or closed. Adding to the sense of dislocation this caused was the fact that he couldn't feel his arms or legs. He wondered perhaps if he was dead. It wasn't as frightening as the first time, but it was much darker.

Curious, he attempted to move his arms and jerked in pain as the blood began to rush back into his numbed limbs, giving him a vicious case of pins and needles. So he was still alive. As the pain began to subside and he became more aware of his surroundings, he realised that his wrists and ankles had been bound. He also discovered that he was sitting on a hard, straight-backed chair and the reason for the darkness was that someone had blindfolded him.

Unfortunately for whoever had taken him hostage however, they had neglected to gag him.

"Oi!" Gene barked, the full force of his rage at the indignities that had been visited upon him coming through in the volume of his voice. "If whatever twat did this to me doesn't untie me _now_, I'm going to give him such a bloody great thump that he'll be sucking the rest of his meals up his arsehole!"

* * *

Luigi's – the working day always ended there, even if it wasn't really Luigi's anymore. The new owner had made it known that he was unhappy with Fenchurch's finest using his restaurant as their social club, said it scared away other customers; but still the coppers came. They had nowhere else to go.

Alex sat opposite Keats and twirled the stem of her wineglass, seeking an excuse not to make eye contact with him. It had surprised her when he'd asked her out to dinner shortly after she had verified his identification, although she suspected the invitation was more about business than pleasure. They'd found throughout their dinner conversation that they shared a similar sense of humour, taste in music and progressive ideas on police policy, which had made the whole thing far more pleasant than Alex had anticipated. But now they could no longer put off the reason they were there and an uncomfortable silence had fallen over them.

She took the first plunge. "I just don't understand why he would do it." There was no need to say to whom she was referring, they both knew.

"Some men don't need a reason."

"But not the Guv, he wouldn't do something like that."

Keats leant in towards her, fixing her with a hard stare. When his voice became softer, serious, his London accent became less pronounced, taking on a growling anonymity. "We only ever see as much of anyone as they're willing to show. But even the best actor will let slip little pieces of himself. Surely you must have seen the rage, the brutality that lies so close to the surface.

"You don't know what he's really like, Alex; but I _know_ him. I've seen what he's capable of. This isn't the first time that he's killed and I won't let the corruption he's surrounded himself with protect him anymore." Overwhelmed with emotion, Keats looked down at his clenched fists. His knuckles were white.

Alarmed by the depth of his feeling, Alex reached out and gently laid her hands over Keats's clenched ones. She was rewarded by feeling him relax beneath her touch. His eyes rose to her face once more and he attempted a shaky, uncertain smile.

Withdrawing her hands, Alex plucked the napkin from her lap and dabbed delicately at the corners of her mouth with it. The food she had eaten lay heavy in her stomach and the wine lent a blushing warmth to her cheeks. She stood, walking the short length of the table to stand beside Jim. Resting one hand on his shoulder, she leant in close to whisper in his ear. "Why don't we go somewhere more private?"

Keats needed to further persuasion.

* * *

The blindfold was pulled none too gently from Gene's eyes. A few long seconds of further blindness followed as his eyes struggled to adjust to the sudden flood of light and colour. When his vision cleared enough to reveal the identity of the man standing in front of him, he lunged violently forwards to attack. Secured to the chair as he was, Gene toppled it forwards and would have ended up flat on his face, had not his captor reached out to steady the chair.

"Robert, you bastard coward!" Gene huffed, pulling indignantly at the ropes that held him. "Untie me and we'll sort this out properly, _mano el mano_."

"Oh I don't think so, Gene," smirked the missing DI, now found but still in unknown whereabouts.

Gene sank back and regarded the DI through speculative, half-lidded eyes. "Why?" He was not referring to the refusal of freedom.

"Because what does it matter, the things I do or don't do? None of this is real."

Gene considered this statement for a moment and then sagely opined "Oh joy, I've been kidnapped by a bloody loony tune."

"No," the DI grinned – a quick, feral baring of the teeth – "no I'm not, you see, _mate_. Just hear me out a second and then we'll decide who the bloody loony tune here is, yeah?" Still with that smile resting dangerously on his lips, he walked up to Gene, who flinched despite himself as Robert planted one foot on the space of chair between the Guv's legs and leant down towards him.

"I dug up your corpse, Gene," the DI confided in a harsh stage whisper as he absentmindedly straightened the lapels of the Guv's jacket. Gene glared squarely back at his tormentor, not even recoiling from the smell of death and decay that rode towards him on the man's breath.

"It probably never would have been found, had not someone decided to build a shiny new shopping mall on that shitty piece of rural wasteland. We were called in to dig up that stinking, rotten corpse, still with tatters of the uniform clinging to the bone and I identified it. Gene Hunt. Reported missing in nineteen fifty-three."

Robert's hands fluttered against the Guv's shoulders, revealing his underlying tension. After a moment they settled back upon the lapels, gripping tightly now. "Then I had a little accident. Cracked over the head by a criminal fleeing the scene of a robbery. When I came to, I go to my office to report the incident and who do I find there but Gene Hunt? Gene 'Half-a-face' Hunt, deceased. Can you imagine what that must have felt like?"

Gene looked away, not deigning to reply.

"Then," the DI continued, his low voice belying the fire that burned in his eyes and the spittle on his lips, "Then I run into Alex Drake, killed by a madman's bullet three years ago. It was then that I realised I was truly free. I could do whatever I wanted to whoever I wanted. What did it matter? We're all dead here, nothing worse can happen. It was just like he'd said."

"Just like who said?"

Robert's eyes slid away, avoiding the question.

Gene sighed. His indignation paled a little in sympathy for the poor lunatic in front of him. You saw it sometimes on the Job: a good man driven mad by the pressure and the horrors he witnessed day after day. "I could have saved you."

The other man laughed then, his face twisting in disgust. "Saved me? Like you did for all the others, Gene? Oh yeah, I know all about them. I know everything about your sordid little game, how you use the poor suckers that stumble into here to fuel your narcissistic desires. You're not a saviour Gene, you're a sadistic gaoler and I've been releasing the poor bastards you've trapped here. I'm going to give them peace at last."

An indeterminate amount of silence followed. Gene sat perfectly still, his eyes closed, whilst his captor stood over him, breathing heavily with pent-up emotion. It was as if the whole world had shrunk down to just the two of them, locking them forever in that one moment.

Then, the spell was broken by Gene opening his eyes and demanding to know "What the bloody 'ell are you on about?"

The DI's lips twitched. "Deny it all you want, Gene Genie, I'm still going to destroy you."

Seeing the DI fumble in his jacket for something, Gene knew that his time was limited. With a strength borne of the inborn greed for life, he threw his upper body forwards and would have landed Robert a crippling head-butt to the solar plexus had not something happened to distract both him and his intended victim.

"Robert, tsk tsk, where are you manners? You can't start the party without the guest of honour."

Both Gene and the DI turned towards the voice. Unable to halt his momentum, however, Gene caught a glancing blow to the head from the DI's elbow as he turned to face the newcomer. He grunted involuntarily in pain and frustration.

"Gene? Gene! Are you alright?"

"Bolly?"

She was standing by the door, Keats behind her. There was a benign smile on his face as he twisted one of her arms up behind her back to keep her from breaking free. Her face was frightened but determined, the slight smudge of a mascara tear lingering on her left cheek. Gene felt anxiety grip him for the first time since waking up to his situation and silently cursed Alex for getting involved.

"What are you doing here? This isn't the time for a social visit, woman. I left you working on a case."

"I remembered, Gene!" Alex burst out, tears springing to her eyes but not falling. "I remembered all of it! Chris and Ray and Shaz and Molly and… and you.

And _him_!" She viciously thrust her index finger of her free hand in Robert's direction. "I found a file in his flat when we searched it. He mist have had it on him when he died and somehow it crossed over with him to here, because it had obituaries of people when they died in the real world. He was working on a case that was reopened when they found your body. I saw it all from my… my hospital bed." She valiantly sniffed back the tears that threatened to choke her. "They worked out that you were a previously unknown of first victim in a spate of cop killings in the fifties and sixties. And Robert found out, he knows who the killer was! Who killed you…"

For a moment Gene was furious. How could Alex let him down like this, buying into these ridiculous conspiracy theories when he needed her clear-headed and aware.

Then, Keats cocked two fingers at him in imitation of a gun and grinned. "Bang bang."

It all came back to Gene in an agonising rush. His mind took him back and once again he was kicked down the door to that isolated house, all ego and skinny arms. Again, he saw the shadowy figure, the gun rising towards him, the strange lack of pain as his brain was blasted out the back of his skull; barking laughter the last thing he would ever hear.

He slumped against the ropes that held him as abruptly as if he'd died all over again. He remembered everything – how Alex had revealed the truth to him before and how, after she had moved on, he'd had to rebuild his whole world. Subconsciously, he must have rewound back to 1981, erasing Alex's disastrous arrival. But she was here again and this time she had found his murderer. Keats.

"Good work, Bolly," he conceded gruffly.

"I'm so sorry," she whispered, the tears finally spilling down her cheeks.

"Oh Alex, you're breaking my heart," Keats murmured, the smile never leaving his face. "Robert, fetch the lady a chair; she's overwrought and needs to sit down."

A chair was brought and Alex secured to it. Her struggles were weak and half-hearted. It was as if the weight of her knowledge had paralysed her. Perhaps she was simply ready for true death. Gene wasn't sure if he was, not like this. There was a certain finality to his dying here at Keats's hands, but no justice.

"Scotland Yard, here we come," Jim laughed as he clapped Robert on the shoulder. "Just one more job to do before your promotion, yeah?"

The DI nodded eagerly, drawing his gun. "You've saved your last soul, Hunt."

Ignoring his death sentence, Gene turned his head towards Alex. "Pub?"

Her face was pinched and tight with fear, but she managed a smile. "Pub."

"First round's on me." He glanced back at her, wanting to give reassurance, but she had already closed her eyes. Gritting his teeth, Gene stared down the barrel of the gun pointed at his head and wondered if his world would carry on without him.

Two shots rang out.


	9. Chapter 9

**A.N./ **Sorry again about the massive delay! Moved house, didn't have the internet, blah blah blah. Hope this chapter is worth the wait, haha. =]

* * *

Alex flinched, expecting the sharp shocking pain that would suffuse her whole body until it dragged her down into darkness, but it never came. Instead, she heard the guttural grunt of a man in pain. Panicked, she looked over to Gene, gasping when she saw him crumpled awkwardly against the ropes that bound him.

"Gene!" Her voice came out in a hoarse scream that she could barely recognise as her own. Somehow, she couldn't bring herself to believe that it could end like this – that the great Gene Hunt could be put down so easily. And now she was next. Fearfully, she turned towards Keats.

"Christ Bolly, can't even the Great Beyond keep that pretty little mouth of yours shut?"

Hardly able to believe the evidence her senses were presenting her with, Alex grinned with an abandon only the survivors of certain death can know. "No Guv, we're alive – look!"

Keats was sprawled on the floor, staring in disbelief at the bullet wound in his shoulder. Blood spilled from between the tourniquet of his fingers. On the floor beside him, near his hip, another bullet hole smoked in the floor. DI Robert stood behind him, staring with open-mouthed incomprehension at the door. Gene and Alex turned to take in the miraculous sight.

Never had an arrival been timelier or more welcome that Chris, Ray and Shaz's at that moment. They stood fanned out in the doorway, looking like dreamers who had just awoken from a deep sleep. Shocked and pale, Shaz knuckled her eyes in between gazing around at her surroundings in wonder. Ray's face was set with a determination that did not yet have a focus, whilst Chris gazed sheepishly at the recently-fired gun in his hands.

Shaz was the first to surface from her disorientated state. Spotting the predicament her superiors were in, she gave a cry of "Ma'm!" and started to run towards Alex.

She did not seem to notice the two other men until the loud click of a gun being primed to fire rang out and Robert warned "Not another step." She drew up short, her eyes widening in surprise. The gun in the DI's grip shook slightly.

"Shoot her, shoot the bitch," Keats howled from the floor, hissing and spitting with pain. At his words, the DI's face hardened and his hands became steady. With renewed calm, he levelled the gun at the bewildered Shaz's chest.

Chris's gun fired again, the bullet impacting with Robert's hand just as he pulled his own trigger. The gun clattered out of his hand and the bullet intended for Shaz's heart lodged harmlessly in a wall. Robert turned terrified eyes to his mentor.

"You said I was dead! If I am, then why am I bleeding?"

"I knew you were a few screws short of sane, but I didn't know you were stupid," Keats sneered. With an effort that contorted his plump features, he got to his feet. The atmosphere tensed as if the world had taken a collective breath, drawing all the air from the room in which their drama played out. He turned to Gene, the sneer still twisting his mouth. "Trained them well, haven't you Gene? Not even absolution can keep them from muddying their hands for you." He threw back his head in a wild, chilling laugh.

With surprising speed, especially considering the injury he had sustained, Keats threw his unhurt arm around Shaz's neck and shoulders, drawing her against him as a human shield. His smile widened, revealing all of his neat white teeth. "Keep that face of yours pretty, yeah Gene? Don't go getting any more holes blown in it; I'll be seeing it again sometime." He glanced to the side, movement alerting him to the fact that Chris and Ray were preparing to rush him and save their fair maiden. "No closer or I'll snap her neck," he informed them pleasantly, stopping them in their tracks. Then, his voice taking on that harsher quality, he told Robert to come along.

The DI hovered, irresolute. "But I belong here," he said at last.

Keats laughed. "Not anymore."

"No, I suppose not; not after what I've done."

Under Shaz's unwilling protection, the two men made it to the door. When he judged that they had retreated to a safe enough distance, Keats forcefully pushed his hostage back through the doorway before turning and running. Like a bloodhound on the scent, Ray took off after them immediately. Chris paused to catch the stumbling Shaz in his arms, but soon followed his friend when she urged him to "Go after them, you nonce."

Fiercely wiping away any tears that might have dared to ruin her carefully applied mascara, Shaz untied Gene and Alex.

"Oh Shaz," Alex sighed happily, embracing the younger woman as soon as she was freed. "Thank you so much. It's so good to see you again."

"You took your bloody time," Gene grumbled. There was pride and affection in his eyes, if not in his voice. Laughing, Shaz bestowed a hug upon him as well.

Chris and Ray appeared at the door, panting slightly. Between them struggled Keats and Robert, arms held pinned behind their backs. Seemingly mindless of further injuring himself, Keats howled with laughter and snarled in erratic alternation as he twisted furiously in Ray's grip. Quieter, Robert watched his partner in crime with what looked like growing disgust and concern on his face.

Gene nodded in grim approval at his two officers. "Jim Keats, DI Robert, you are under arrest for murder. You have the right to remain silent and I suggest you use it wisely, because I am not in a good mood." He cast a disdainful eye over the prisoners and then began to walk towards the door.

"What about the rest of our rights? This isn't a legal arrest!" Robert protested, his eyes wide.

There was a second of absolute stillness, the outcome of which was inevitable to everyone except the DI. Ray and Chris exchanged looks over the tops of their prisoners' heads, before quickly looking away when Gene turned around. Slowly, like an animal stalking its prey, Gene approached Robert. In one swift, powerful movement, he balled his fist and drove it into his DI's stomach. With a loud exhalation of breath, Robert doubled up.

The volume of Keats' laughter increased. "The brutality Gene, the force, it's no wonder your world is falling apart, you've got no _finesse_." Seeing the DCI come towards him, hands clenched, he drew up straight and became serious faster than a sane human being had any right to. "Are you going to hit me too, Gene? You can't stand knowing that I've won again. Go on; express your impotent anger through violence."

"I wouldn't want to get my hands dirty," the Guv growled and walked away.

* * *

Alex fell so easily back into the routine of everyday police work in the CID department it soon felt as if it were the only life she had ever known. No longer was she plagued by confusion or self-doubt. She had finally found a place to belong.

Nor was she the only one to benefit from a feeling of general well-being – she had seen Shaz and Chris holding hands, or having quiet conversations together when they thought no one else was around. It filled Alex with parental pride to watch their relationship tentatively begin to blossom once again. She was even able t push aside the vague, nagging feeling that she should be watching a different young woman take her first faltering steps on the road to true love, that she had been robbed of something important. But that was a ridiculous thought. Everything was as it should be.

The days were filled with diligently working to prove the guilt of the two murderers locked up in the cells, and in the evenings they descended upon Luigi's to fluster the new owner with demands for drinks and ribald conversation of the exploits of the day.

Proving the guilt of DI Robert was easy enough. The morbid evidence found in his flat spelled out his intentions and his own uneasy state of mind led him to confess. Separated from the influence of Jim Keats and nursing a wound in a world that he had believed himself invulnerable in, he moped in his cell, hardly talking except for when in the interview room. The anger at his death and the mad arrogance that had accompanied it seemed to have passed, leaving him a deflated shadow of the man he had been, but an infinitely more agreeable one.

The same could not be said for Keats, however. He maintained an air of cheerful conceit, generally making a nuisance of himself. It was no unusual for the CID team's work to be punctuated by his deliberately off-key singing, audible even from the cells.

Despite his cockiness, Alex was sure that the paper she had found in DI Robert's desk would be enough to convict Keats of being an accessory to murder at the least. The paper bore Keats' signature in the same handwriting as the threat that had been written on the whiteboard the night of Bammo's murder. The letter itself was nothing incriminating on the surface, just a summons to the internal affairs department, but Alex was convinced this was the letter that had started the friendship between the two felons. All of Keats' identification was false, she was sure, just something he used to entrap his victims. Going back over the crime scenes, Ray and Shaz had also been able to find evidence linking him to the murders. He was as good as convicted.

The one thing they would not be able to charge him with was the murder of Gene Hunt, because anyone could clearly see that Gene Hunt was alive and well. Explaining otherwise would just cause far too many complications. This miscarriage of justice irritated Alex like the prickly touch of an insect she was unable to catch, but it seemed to have the opposite effect on Gene. He drank less these days, his surly moods had disappeared and he no longer paced his office with all the impotent rage of a caged lion. Of course, he still swore, raged and generally acted like a bigot, but some things would never change and Alex was secretly glad about that. Looking at him, she saw a man finally at peace with himself and the world he had created.

It was the day before the trial and Gene was making his way towards the cells, footsteps echoing hollowly in the corridor. Keats was not singing, but had taken up a maudlin whistling that set Gene's teeth on edge.

"Come to gloat?" Keats asked as he caught sight of his visitor, upper lip lifting in an insincere smile.

Ignoring the question, the Guv took up his position outside the cell – arms folded across his chest, feet planted slightly apart, head lowered like a bull about to charge. The posturing of the alpha male. He was here to receive answers, not to give them. "Why did you come back?"

"Manners, Gene; I asked first." Keats' eyes darted to the side, where a few cells down Robert was asleep on his bunk. "I couldn't leave the poor man in distress, he was crying out for help. He didn't want to be stuck in your little ego trip. I was saving him!" His voice rose to a shout and he suddenly flung himself against the bars.

Gene watched impassively. "When he's served his time, he's coming back here as my DI and he's going to make sure you never come sniffing around my patch again."

Disbelief registered on Keats' face. "You haven't…"

"Oh yes I have, Jimmy-boy. He's one of mine now."

The seething rage that lurked just beneath the surface of the creature that was Jim Keats boiled over, turning him into a raving, snarling monster. Gradually, it began to die down, leaving him panting with the exertion. "Keep him, I don't want the spineless little shit. But you can't keep them all, Gene, remember that. Remember Viv? You can't save them all." He grinned suddenly. "After all, you couldn't even save yourself."

Unconsciously, Gene flexed his hands into fists, his jaw clenching. "You come near any of my officers and I'll snap your neck, Jimbo."

"I'm sure you'd have no trouble doing that," Keats practically purred, his voice a taunting silken drawl. "And you'd cover it up just fine. Lose some paperwork here, bully a false statement out of someone there. You're corrupt, Gene. A bent copper."

Keats watched as Gene began walking away and then shouted after him, a note of desperation creeping into his voice. "You may think you've won this time, but one day you'll end up in Hell with me, where you belong!"

The day of the trial arrived and Robert was already being driven to the court. Chris and Ray had been sent to the cells to retrieve Keats, ready for him to make the short journey. The relative peace of CID was suddenly broken by Chris rushing in, a look of bewildered panic on his face. Gene looked up sharply from his office desk, already knowing what had happened, but dreading to hear it articulated.

"It's Keats, Guv! He's disappeared!"


	10. Epilogue

They had all known that this day would come. Robert was in prison serving a sentence for murder and although Keats had not been found, it was unlikely that he would show his face again. It was inevitable that it should happen, and yet it still came as a shock.

Gene strode into CID, pulling on his coat. He stood for a moment, surveying his team, waiting for their attention to focus on him, their Guv. When all eyes were on him, he announced just one word, the one they had both longed for and feared: "Pub."

A look of panic suddenly filled Ray's face and he stood up so violently that he knocked his chair over. "No, not yet. You can't."

Gene eloquently raised an eyebrow. "What's the matter with you, Raymondo? Turned poofy?"

"I believe they prefer to be called homosexuals," Alex chipped in primly.

"I'll call 'em whatever they want, as long as they stay the 'ell away from my trousers," Gene shot back. "Come on Ray, first round's on me."

Calmer, Ray looked down and huffed with resigned displeasure through his nose. Shaking his head, he took a last drag on the embers of his cigarette before crushing it out in one of the ashtrays Alex had installed on all of the smokers' desks after realising she would never get them to take their nicotine fix outside in the fresh air. "Most expensive pint they've got?" he enquired, raising his head.

"Good man." Avoiding the question, Gene turned and strode from the room, confident that he would be followed.

Outside, the evening had brought out the stars. They hung over the heads of the police officers, too big and too bright. Ahead, Shaz and Chris held hands, heads together in giggling conversation like teenagers on their first date, whilst Ray lamented what having a girlfriend had done to his best friend. They made Alex feel like crying, although from pride or loss she wasn't sure. The evening was cold and she drew her coat closer around herself, subconsciously leaning in towards Gene for warmth and comfort.

They bypassed Luigi's, their feet leading them instinctively towards their destination. And suddenly there it was, looming up where it should never have been – the Railway Arms. Shaz gave a little cry as she recognised it, turning towards Gene with her eyes shining.

"Thank you, Guv. I'll never forget you," she promised, going up on tiptoes to throw her arms around the older man's neck in a fierce hug, her lips briefly brushing his cheek. Then she took Chris's hand in hers and ran with him towards the door of the Railway arms, which opened invitingly for them as they approached.

"See you in a minute, Guv," Chris called over his shoulder, having time to wave before he disappeared into the warm glow of the pub.

Ray stood for a moment, his face set. Then, he raised his hand and snapped off a sharp salute, before turning and walking away without a word.

Alex and Gene were alone again, facing eternity. Knowing that she too had to go, Alex turned imploring eyes up to the Guv. "You don't have to stay behind this time." Tears filled her eyes and trembled on her lashes as Gene shook his head. "But there's nothing here for you anymore, you're free," she protested. "You found out who murdered you, brought him to justice. You've done so much, helped so many people; please help yourself now."

He was looking over her shoulder. Blinking tears out of her eyes, she turned to see what had caught his attention. There were two figures standing in the doorway, watching them. Sam Tyler she recognised from his photograph when she had worked on his case just before she died, and the woman he had his arm around could only be Annie. They were both smiling. Sam raised his free hand and waved.

Alex turned back to Gene with new hope. "See? It's your time to go. You've been so happy the past few days, I've never seen you so at peace. Surely you realise that you have to move on sometime. After all, you can't say here forever." Anxious not to lose him again, wanting him to have the peace that he deserved, she took his face gently between her hands.

"Forever's not so long."

"No…" Alex's face crumpled into tears. "No, you can't."

"They're waiting for you, Alex."

Defiantly, she shook her head. "No, they're waiting for you and I won't go without you."

He paused and then bent his head down towards her, taking her mouth in a rough, yet infinitely tender kiss. Fiercely, she kissed back, surprised when it was finished all too soon. Gently, he wiped the tears from her eyes and nodded towards the Railway Arms. "Off with you woman, I can take care of myself."

"I… I love…" Alex bit off what she was about to say, letting go of Gene and stepping back. "I'll have a drink waiting for you."

"Nothing with umbrellas in, mind," Gene warned.

"No, heaven forbid you should let go of your manly pride for even a second," Alex sniffled, attempting a watery smile through her tears. Taking control of herself, she turned and began walking towards the Railway Arms, but was called back by Gene shouting her name. She turned to look back at him.

"Alex? I love you too."

Those words, the ones she had always secretly longed to hear, filled her with the courage and happiness to take the final steps into the pub. She was enfolded into the arms of its inhabitants and the door closed behind her with an air of finality.

Standing alone out in the street, Gene wondered if he should go after all. Perhaps his work here really was done. He had found his peace. But then, carried on the wind, he thought he heard a voice calling his name. He thought of his brother, of the lives that he had been unable to save and knew that he had made the right decision. He belonged here. There would always only be one Gene Hunt and his team needed him.


End file.
